Here we are on the day before the 100th day of the Trump Presidency (or Der Einhundert Tage, as Jonah Goldberg calls it, or perhaps Les Cent Jours, in honor of Trump’s advocacy for Marine Le Pen, or even Один hundnred дней in honor of his [perhaps now somewhat-moderated] affection for all things Putin.)
It’s becoming clearer and clearer that we have a President who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and who admits it. It’s just completely mind-boggling. He didn’t realize it would be so hard, he says in the now-infamous Reuters interview.
What did he expect? As Jonah Goldberg says in his G-File today,
Trump also says that he thought his old job would be harder than being the president of the United States. And I believe him. There are a lot of stories around Washington that jibe with this. Trump wanted to be something of a ceremonial figure, a bit like a British monarch in the 19th century, who gives some direction to the prime minister, but otherwise serves as an emblem of national greatness. It turns out that there’s more to the job than going around giving MAGA speeches and riffing on the media.
And, of course, as I’ve said so many times before: This was a stunt Presidency. He never expected to win.
Here’s the thing: There were many of us conservatives who were petrified at the idea of this man’s getting into the White House. We knew what would happen, and it is happening: We said that a Trump victory would stain the conservative cause for a generation and probably signal the end of the Republican Party.
Here’s a quotation from one of those very conservatives, Susan Wright, a contributor to the website RedState.com:
It’s like a scene from the old, early-80s miniseries, “V,” where the “visitors” to our planet peel back their faces to reveal the reptilian aliens underneath.
The slow-motion horror of Trump supporters, as the mask of the administration is peeled away and they begin to see the true face of who they voted for – big government liberals, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump – is rather satisfying.
We tried to tell them.
I have enormous respect for Wright and have posted many of her articles on my Facebook page. But here’s the thing: she ranted and raved about how terrible Trump was, and how we shouldn’t elect him, but she said she wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, either. Neither choice was godly. But one choice was going to prevail. Yes, she tried to warn people not to vote for Trump, but what was the point? Why tell people to just stay above the fray?
I thought this quotation from Gene Weingarten over at the Washington Post was particularly telling, as he addresses a whole laundry list of conservatives (including George Will) who lambasted Trump during the election but just would not go that one extra mile and endorse Clinton:
I suggest that not one of you thinks the current situation is better for the United States than if Clinton had been elected, and that is because you are smart people.. . . Would endorsing Clinton have changed the course of the election? Who knows? It’s not that it would have been a tactically important move; but it would surely have been an ethically important move. But you held back. You couldn’t pull the trigger. I think it was a failure of nerve, and of character.
There were a few lonely voices in the NeverTrump camp telling us to vote for Hillary: Michael Chertoff, John Fund, Tom Nichols, and Thabiti Anyabwile (although that last, in a rather disappointing about-face, ended up voting for Evan McMullin, and what was the point of that?) come to mind. I don’t know how many articles I read on conservative websites saying that the author would not dirty his/her hands by voting for either main-party candidate. (My husband disagrees with me on this, by the way. We’ve had a few warm-ish discussions on the matter.) Kendal Unruh, a Colorado delegate to the RNC who tried to push through a rules change to free the delegates to vote their consciences, said after Trump was nominated that she’d probably write in a candidate, maybe Abraham Lincoln. And I had to say, “Kendal! What are you thinking?”
So now we’re stuck with the humiliation of having a President who keeps admitting that he didn’t know what he was talking about when he was a candidate. Honestly! I’ll just say this:
If you voted for Trump and you’re not calling him on his flip-flops, then you owe John Kerry an apology.